Directing Mum in sex scenes was just SO embarrassing: Charlotte Rampling's film-maker son on a very tricky assignment

When Barnaby Southcombe first asked his mother Charlotte Rampling to star in his psychological thriller I, Anna, she gave him short shrift.

‘The script was very violent, very rough and very, very uncomfortable,’ she says. ‘So hard, so unforgiving, so unbelievably cruel — I just didn’t want to go there.’

Now, Charlotte is . . . well, let’s just say she doesn’t mince her words. Which is fine, except that Barnaby is sitting with us in the library of a chi-chi West End hotel as she demolishes his early script.

Mother and son act: Charlotte Rampling stars in her film-maker son's latest movie I, Anna, and says that directing her is a sex scene was particularly embarrassing

Poor bloke. You know those moments when someone says something tactless and you think ‘Ouch’? Well, this is ouch, ouch, ouch. How on earth has he coped for 40 years with such a relentlessly forthright mum?

‘It can be very harsh,’ he says with the brand of honesty that seems to be part of the family DNA. ‘There was never any leniency when we were mediocre in our attitudes, creative pursuits or school, and it’s quite hurtful when it comes out.

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‘With some of the short films or scripts I’ve written, she’d say, “Oh no. It just doesn’t work, does it?” Which I guess was right, but it’s a brutal thing to hear.

‘I think we — my brother and sister as well — have very high expectations of ourselves. It’s possibly why it’s taken me longer to do my first film.’

Charlotte’s cool green eyes flash icily: ‘God, you’ve only just turned 40, but maybe we just think we’re not doing it fast enough.’

Crikey, this tough love cuts pretty close to the bone, but, as Charlotte says, ‘that’s the way I am.’ And Barnaby?

Well, he went off and reworked the script.

Family affair: Barnaby with his mother during the 1970s. He says his parents tried to shield him from the fact she was a sex symbol

Charlotte is, of course, the provocative actress who’s been making movies for more than four decades, most memorably The Damned and The Night Porter, in which she co-starred with Dirk Bogarde.

In France, where she lives for most of the year with her fiancé, communications tycoon Jean-Noel Tassez, she’s known simply as La Legende. She’s a 66-year-old grandmother with the sort of cheekbones most actresses half her age pay to have implanted, but would no more go under the knife herself than accept a part in Dallas.

When Barnaby presented her with his rewrite of I, Anna, she was captivated. ‘I thought this is such an extraordinary, tailored, insightful, deep, profound piece of work and very well-written,’ she says. Which it is.

Charlotte co-stars in the film, also directed by her son, as emotionally on-the-edge divorcee Anna, who picks up blokes in singles bars and gives them . . . well, suffice to say she’s not helping them with GCSE French.

Barnaby was three months old when Charlotte stripped naked in The Night Porter, so he has grown up with her as a sex symbol, though he says his parents (his late father was her first husband and agent Bryan Southcombe) tried to shield him from that side of her career. Still, wasn’t it rather, well, tricky directing his mum in a sex scene?

‘It was so awkward,’ he says. ‘Thankfully Ralph (actor Ralph Brown, whose character George Stone is brutally murdered in the film) and Mum said: “Right. This is what we need to do. Come on. Where’s the camera? This is the angle.”

‘That was the day we had a set visit from somebody Mum had known for ever. I hadn’t seen her since I was four.

She came on set saying: “Isn’t it great you’re doing this film?” Of all the scenes she could have come to see . . .’

I’m sure this close friend barely raised an eyebrow. Charlotte is not the conventional type. Born in Sturmer, a village in Essex, her stunning looks landed her roles in films such as Rotten To The Core and Georgy Girl and she was a prominent part of the Swinging Sixties.

Leading lady: Charlotte Rampling as on-the-edge Anna who picks up men in bars in a new thriller I, Anna, directed by her son

She married Barnaby’s father in 1972, but left him when she met composer Jean Michel Jarre at a party in Cannes and fell immediately in love. Their marriage lasted until 1997 — they have a son, the magician David Jarre and she’s stepmother to fashion designer Émilie Jarre — but then she discovered Jarre was having an affair.

Their relationship, and Barnaby’s childhood, had been badly battered by Charlotte’s crippling depression. Tellingly, depression is a central theme in I, Anna. ‘Depression means you have no contact with anybody any more,’ says Charlotte, her green eyes haunted by the memory. ‘You don’t feel anything. The point is to keep working, to keep loving — just to be out there — and not to be closed in.

‘You go outside your front door every day and it’s like saying a prayer, “I’m just asking in this day for things to happen.” And they do.’

Charlotte has attributed her depression to her sister Sarah’s suicide. At 23, Sarah shot herself after giving birth prematurely and losing her child. Her father insisted they must never tell her mother. So Charlotte was forced to live with the lie that her sister had died of a brain haemorrhage until her mother’s death.

Barnaby was five years old when his mother first became immersed in depression, soon after his brother David’s birth.

‘You’re shut out. So I guess you watch. Whether that’s what turned me into an observer — or maybe it was sitting in corners of sets with you?’ he says, looking over at his mother.

She recalls how they travelled a lot when he was a child. ‘And you were the child of a separated marriage. It’s all those things that make a child grow up quicker sometimes than he needs to be in certain areas.’

Initially, Barnaby set his heart on being an actor. He appeared in school plays at which his mother says he was ‘very good’. The desire to be a director kicked in during his time at university in London and he’s since directed the popular TV shows Waterloo Road and Bad Girls.

Charlotte says her son has put his heart and soul into I, Anna, which is a truly gripping film. He rewrote the script in the months following his father’s sudden death from an aneurism in April 2007. Looking at Barnaby, she says: ‘When I saw the script I knew something had happened in your head. Of course it would — your father dying so brutally.’

Barnaby, who is married with two children of his own, shakes his head: ‘It’s not about grief.’

But Charlotte insists: ‘It doesn’t have to be about anything like that. It’s how you channel when you have major events in your life.

Charlotte turns to me: ‘He’s a very good actor’s director, because you trust him. You feel you can give him your heart. Trust and honesty.’ And, in that moment, Charlotte’s astonishing eyes are full of love for her son.